Application Migration to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 in 189 Days

Windows XP end of extended support is April 8, 2014 which is only 189 days away. Enterprises that haven’t yet migrated from XP to Windows 7 or XP to Windows 8.1 are assuming a big risk in continuing to run XP. There is a great risk of Windows XP blog by Tim Rains highlighting security risks in the end of life era for Windows XP. Essentially, hackers can reverse engineer security patches to newer versions of Windows and exploit any similar vulnerabilities that exist in XP. These vulnerabilities will always exist going forward given that there will be no new security updates.

Estimating Application Migration Schedules

I was discussing with one of my colleagues today if enterprises can legitimately migrate thousands of applications to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 in 189 days. We thought that the Effort Calculator feature in the Citrix AppDNA application migration software could be a useful tool in helping organizations to understand the answer to this question. The AppDNA Effort Calculator uses the application compatibility assessments built into AppDNA and after layering on some project variables it can extrapolate a total cost and total time for an application migration project. In tinkering with some the project variables users can get a sense of the size of the team they would need to migrate a large application portfolio in a short period of time (like 189 days).

Example XP to Windows 8.1 Effort Calculation

A common scenario is moving from XP to Windows 8.1. For this I imported into Citrix AppDNA a 200 application sample set for application compatibility analysis, then used the Effort Calculator to extrapolate from that sample to a 2000 application portfolio. The AppDNA Effort Calculator is using defect, complexity and remediation difficulty information from your own actual application portfolio to make these calculations. In the screen capture below I had altered the staff costs and then fiddled with the team sizes until I was able to come up with a plan for finishing a 2000 application migration to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 in under 6 months. This worksheet updates realtime, so I was able to make small changes, like adding one person to the test team, and see the impact that one resource would have on cost and schedule.

At first it doesn’t look good…

Citrix AppDNA explains based on the application compatibility issues, this 2,000 application portfolio would take 17+ months to migrate, even with AppDNA automating the process. Note without AppDNA it would take 55 months!

Getting Closer…

By increasing the number of people working on the application remediation and application testing/staging teams to 10 people on each team, the application migration can now be completed with AppDNA in 7.6 months.

Perfect!

Now AppDNA has shown the actual staff needed to complete the application migration work for this XP migration in just 5.24 months- it turns out we need 15 people on testing and another 15 on application testing/staging to complete the application compatibility work in time.

Get Citrix AppDNA and Try Application Migration Planning for Yourself

Here is the good part. The report that I generated above is available at no cost in the evaluation version of AppDNA. Simply install the evaluation and import a sampling of your application portfolio. The AppDNA evaluation lets you import an unlimited number of applications, so if you have a huge portfolio you can still import a representative sample. Then use the AppDNA Effort Calculator to model and extrapolate. All you have to do now is download the AppDNA application migration software trial. If you wait until tomorrow you will only have 188 days left!